The Dartmouth trustees blink

This past September a majority of the Dartmouth board of trustees voted to pull the plug on the democratic system of governance that’s been in place since 1891. They did so by voting to double the contingent of self-selected trustees to 16, as compared to the 8 who are elected by Dartmouth alumni. Shortly after the vote to alter the compositon of the board, the Dartmouth Association of Alumni brought suit to have the board’s action declared illegal. A friend writes regarding the latest development in the lawsuit:

The attorneys for the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees and for the Dartmouth Association of Alumni reached an agreement on Valentine’s Day that the College would indefinitely forebear from seating new trustees under the Trustees’ September 7 Board-expansion plan.
In light of Judge Vaughan’s recent denial of the College’s motion to dismiss, and the likelihood that the Judge would follow up his decision with an injunction preventing the Trustees from increasing the size of the Board, the Trustees have accepted not to increase the size of the Board for the time being, and if they change their decision, they will notify the AoA of this decision 45 days prior tool its implementation. Clearly the College has finally understood the strength of the AoA case against it.

Dartmouth’s statement regarding the truce is posted here; the attorneys’ Joint Notice Concerning Dartmouth Trustee Elections is posted in PDF here. Joe Malchow headlines his post on the development “Board-packing plan delayed indefinitely.” We started following the doings at Dartmouth three years ago at the outset of the campaign that resulted in the election of Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki to the board in my Standard column “Bucking the deans at Dartmouth.”
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